I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.

I’ve got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:

$ rm -rf ./bin

As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.

You know, the war stories.

Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.

Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like… just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.

  • SuperFolaEnglish
    12•28 days ago

    I mounted a disk of a server in rescue mode, since I needed to extract everything (the provider didn’t have the option to dump everything as a zip). Then installed an FTP server, added a user/pass, it worked.

    But I couldn’t access the files of the original disk, even though I could see them. So I just chgrp/chown the original files, since the disk was just “mounted” in the rescue disk /mnt, I thought it was alright (at the time I thought permissions were volatile, stored separately from the files). I could now download the entire disk, yay!

    Upon booting the original disk again, a bunch of errors: shell not starting, tools not running, because they were owned by user and not root…

    Well we reinstalled all the server from scratch that day.